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“A good day,” he said in a 2013 documentary about him, “is when nobody shows up and you don’t have to go anywhere.”

Which summed up his latter years, after he retired from the line of care products sold under his name that carried his bearded visage on packaging.

Of the expanding list of salves, unguents, poultices and creams marketed by the company, the best known may have been the one that made it easier for millions to speak and to eat, to drink, to kiss, and to open wider for dental work. It sold under the name Burt’s Bees Lip Balm.

As the name suggests, it was applied to prevent or treat raw, cracked or chapped lips, and it was among the most widely recognized products made by a company eventually purchased by Clorox in 2007 for almost a billion dollars.

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Shavitz, who had been bought out years earlier by a partner, saw little of that money but he was by no means impoverished. Indeed, he could be seen in many ways as a modern day Henry David Thoreau, who sought a simple life and pursued it in the small town of Parkman in central Maine, where he lived for years in a tiny cabin. He lacked a telephone, a television or a water heater.

Burt Shavitz pauses during an interview in 2014 to watch a litter of fox kits play near his home in Parkman, Maine. Shavitz was 80 when he died Sunday. (Robert F. Bukaty / The Associated Press file photo)

Burt’s Bees emphasizes the natural ingredients of its products, and the enterprise sprang from the natural output of 30 or so hives that Shavitz had at a time when he would sell honey by the roadside.

Although he had much of the hermit about him, he also enjoyed traveling on behalf of the company and its products. He told his story in the documentary, Burt’s Buzz, and to numerous interviewers.

In addition, his bewhiskered face appeared on at least one of the company’s products, a hand salve. A cloth cap, with narrow stripes, in the railroad engineer style, is cocked atop his head in a woodcut on the logo.

Growing up in the Long Island town of Great Neck, he was called Ingram Berg Shavitz, and he changed it upon graduation from high school. He did not want to be a factory worker like his father and, after army service in Germany, he began working as a freelance news photographer in New York.

He contributed pictures to the New York Times, Life magazine and other publications but left around 1970, he said, fearing he would die alone someday in a squalid apartment.

After leaving the city for rural upstate New York, he lived in an abandoned house, did odd jobs and gained possession of a bee hive. Something about bee-keeping satisfied him, and a small bequest from a relative enabled him to buy land in Maine for expanded apiary operations.

His life changed in 1984 when he encountered Roxanne Quimby, a single mother and graphic artist, who also enjoyed the simple life. She was hitchhiking when he gave her a ride. The pair clicked.

“She was man-hungry,” he told the New Yorker, “and she and I, by spells, fed the hunger.”

The business grew from their romantic partnership. As the story was often told, he had bees and she had business sense. They sold honey, beeswax and other related products. In the first year of their co-operation, products such as candles helped bring in $20,000.

Their lip balm, which combined beeswax and almond oil, was launched in 1991. They incorporated, with Quimby holding about two-thirds and Shavitz the rest. In two years, sales soared to about $3 million.

By 1994, the company had relocated to Durham, N.C. Product development was Quimby’s responsibility, supervising retailing was his. But he claimed that he was forced out within a few years, following an affair with a young store employee. He got a house in Maine and about 50 acres, valued at about $130,000.

In 2004, Quimby sold most of the company to AEA Investors for a reported $173 million, and she said she gave Shavitz an additional $4 million from the sale. Clorox acquired the company in 2007 for a sum put at more than $900 million.

In an email to The Washington Post, Quimby said Sunday night that she was “deeply saddened” to learn of Shavitz’s death. He “was my mentor and my muse,” she wrote.

Many accounts have indicated that after their break the two seldom if ever spoke. Shavitz was sometimes described as being bitter. But he sometimes took a more philosophical view.

“In the long run,” he was quoted, “I got the land, and land is everything. . . . And money is nothing really worth squabbling about.”

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